Learn how one of Ireland’s leading artisan chocolate manufacturers sweetened their operations by using readily available and affordable digital tools to increase their efficiency and save 8 hours per week of repetitive manual data transfer.
About the company
Wilde Irish Chocolates, a thriving artisan chocolate manufacturer and a prominent tourist destination in Ireland’s Hidden Heartlands, was established over a quarter of a century ago on the shores of Lough Derg in Co. Clare.
With a deep-rooted commitment to traditional artisan chocolate-making techniques, their journey has seen significant expansion over the past 25 years, now encompassing the original chocolate factory, a hot chocolate café, immersive chocolate factory visitor experiences, and a delightful chocolate shop.
Read more about Wilde Irish Chocolates (opens in a new tab)The Challenge
While being a business that is focused on artisan handmade chocolate production of the highest quality, Wilde Irish Chocolates found that they were wasting a lot of time record keeping and manually transferring data from one format to another.
This was using almost 10 hours per week of valuable production management time. In addition, they were also trying to manage the recording of visitor numbers to their chocolate factory visitor experience, so that they could gain some insight into our visitor numbers.
What did they do?
The company consulted with their mentor, provided to them through the Digital for Business programme by their Local Enterprise Office.
Initially, they investigated whether there was a single digital programme which suited their food traceability record keeping requirement. They discovered that off-the-shelf food safety record keeping programmes were difficult to adapt to their specific production process and to acquire something bespoke would be costly. The solution they arrived at was to utilise available, less expensive digital tools, which they already had experience with.
How did it help?
They realised that they were not using the full power of programmes such as MS Excel and Google Forms to make data collection and analysis a more streamlined process and easy for all staff to use.
They are now using Excel forms as a single data entry point for multiple data collection purposes. This data populates into a spreadsheet where staff can now analyse their data more easily. This has freed up at least 8 hours per week of repetitive manual data transfer and has allowed the company to be more strategic by using their data to inform purchasing and production management decisions, and staff time allocations.
Conclusion and future outlook
“As a small food producer in the west of Ireland our budget for digital solutions to data management problems was small, but we realised very quickly that it is worth looking for, and to continually keep looking for, affordable digital tools to use first before paying for large single solutions which may not even exist for your company’s particular requirement.
We have found that there is not one ‘big bang’ digital solution that can be found and that a few really useful apps and tools can actually make a really big difference.”